Imagining Turkey: Turkey at the Genetic Crossroads

In this episode, we host Dr Elise Burton, an historian of science, race and nationalism in the modern Middle East and an Assistant Professor at the Institute of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto. As part of a wide-ranging conversation, we discuss some of Dr Burton's findings from her recent book, “Genetic Crossroads: The Middle East and the Science of Human Heredity”, within which she draws on archival research across the Middle East, Europe, and the United States using sources in Turkish, Persian, Arabic, and Hebrew, to explore how Middle Eastern peoples—both as scientific actors and research subjects—have played an important role in the history of human genetics.